Ongoing New Build - Progress so far! (1 Viewer)

[faulknerm]

Evening all,

I've been planning a media build for quite some time now and have finally gotten my act together and made a start.

Specification as follows -

Athlon 64 X2 4200+
Abit A-S78H
2GB OCZ 800Mhz
500GB WD
LG BD-DVD drive
Ebuyer media case

I'll likely be running Vista with MediaPortal as a front end.

It will form part of my home theatre system - outputting video over HDMI to my 37" LCD TV and audio over digital coaxial to my Pioneer VSX-1016 receiver...

It's all assembled now, but I can't fire it up as I foolishly forgot the heatsink and fan for the CPU, so will have to pick one up from work tomorrow.

 

[faulknerm]

All systems go Cap'n!

I ended up going with XP MCE in the end, for the simple reason that I've mislaid my only Vista DVD

At the moment it's a stock install of MP, but I'm going to spend MANY pleasurable hours playing with it and getting it set up the way I want...

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

Thats not a ugly setup, considering the price

Who say's htpc's have to be expensive, hope you have fun

 

[wonkyd]

Thats quite a neat little thing for 25 notes! Does it just take a standard PSU then?

 

[faulknerm]

Thanks!

It doesn't take a standard ATX PSU unfortunately - needs a matx one, although I picked that up nice and cheaply on Ebay.

It's running very nicely, although I do have a 7750 Black Edition sat doing nothing at the moment, so I'm toying with the idea of swapping it in.

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

it's running very nicely, although I do have a 7750 Black Edition sat doing nothing at the moment

, get it in, great for doing any recoding work, or post to Cheshire

 

[faulknerm]

Crikey, I'd forgotten all about this thread! I was just about to start myself a new project thread when I discovered this one linked in my bookmarks...

Anyway, as is often the case with projects like this my media build got rather sidelined for a few months, due to other commitments, however it's firmly back on track now.

The basic hardware for the actual HTPC is still the same, however I'm now going to be running a seperate dedicated file server to hold the actual media (with a gigabit connection) with a smaller HDD in the actual PC just for system use.

The Server
HP ML-110 G5
1 TB media storage, plus 80GB system drive
2GB ram
Ubuntu Server 9.10
xfs file system

Primarily running as a SAMBA server sharing the media storage, however I plan to add streaming functionality eventually too

The HTPC
Athlon 64 X2 4200+
Abit A-S78H
2GB OCZ 800Mhz
500GB WD
LG BD-DVD drive

Outputting to 37" LCD over HDMI, Pioneer VSX-1016 over optical/digital coax.

The Media
Circa 1100 movie DVD's, all of which will be ripped to the server eventually
Around 50 TV boxsets, ditto above
About 30 HD-DVD and 20 BD-DVD, ditto above
In excess of 5000 mp3 music files, all of which will be transferred to server eventually

The MP Setup
MediaPortal 1.0.2
StreamedMP (using moving pictures)
MyTvSeries


Today has pretty much consisted of faffing about getting the server sorted, as it's been FAR too long since I last did a *nix server config, but it's now all up and running and sharing it's xfs drive with the rest of the network using SAMBA. The next time I will really have to dedicate to the project will be Sunday, when I intend to carry out a clean installation of Windows and MP on the HTPC and also hopefully begin the process of ripping some of the media (when I finally settle on a ripping program and file format!! lol)

Anyway, sorry for rambling on. I'll try to keep this log updated.